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Categories: Environmental: Biodiversity, Space: The Solar System

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The small footprint and dim light of white dwarfs, remnants of stars that have burned through their fuel, may make excellent backdrops for studying planets with enough water to harbor life. The trick is spotting the shadow of a planet against a former star that has withered to a fraction of its size and finding that it's a planet that has kept its water oceans for billions of years even after riding out the star's explosive and violent final throes. A new study of the dynamics of white dwarf systems suggests that, in theory, some watery planets may indeed thread the celestial needles necessary to await discovery and closer scrutiny.

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This study discovered mini-Neptunes around four red dwarfs using observations from a global network of ground-based telescopes and the TESS space telescope. These four mini-Neptunes are close to their parent stars, and the three of them are likely to be in eccentric orbits.

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In addition to its human consequences, cocaine trafficking harms the environment and threatens habitats important to dozens of species of migratory birds, according to a new study.

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Following decades of decline, even fewer birds will darken North American skies by the end of the century, according to a new analysis. The study examines the long-term effects of climate change on the abundance and diversity of bird groups across the continent as a whole while accounting for additional factors that put birds at risk.

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As space travel becomes more frequent, a new biomarker tool was developed by an international team of researchers to help improve the growing field of aerospace medicine and the health of astronauts.

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The structure and function of the kidneys is altered by space flight, with galactic radiation causing permanent damage that would jeopardise any mission to Mars, according to a new study led by researchers from UCL.

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Crater 2, located approximately 380,000 light years from Earth, is one of the largest satellite galaxies of the Milky Way. Extremely cold and with slow-moving stars, Crater 2 has low surface brightness. How this galaxy originated remains unclear. A team of physicists now offers an explanation.

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Astronomers have captured what appears to be a snapshot of a massive collision of giant asteroids in Beta Pictoris, a neighboring star system known for its early age and tumultuous planet-forming activity.

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New research highlights inequities between downstream and upstream countries that share the same watershed. The study outlines how international agreements can better address shared resource problems and call for greater collaboration and coordination between these international neighbors.

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Astrophysicists calculate the likelihood that Earth was exposed to cold, harsh interstellar clouds, a phenomenon not previously considered in geologic climate models.

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An international team of planetary scientists has detected patches of water frost sitting atop the Tharsis volcanoes on Mars, which are not only the tallest volcanic mountains on the Red Planet but in the entire solar system.

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Astronomers observing exoplanet GJ 3470 b saw evidence of water, carbon dioxide, methane and sulfur dioxide. Astronomers hope the discovery of this exoplanet's sulfurous atmosphere will advance our understanding of how planets forms.

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Odysseus, a tenacious lander built by the company Intuitive Machines, almost didn't make it to the moon. But an experiment aboard the spacecraft managed to capture an image of Earth as it might look to observers on a planet far from our own.

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Researchers have provided a simple and comprehensive -- if less dramatic -- explanation for bright radar reflections initially interpreted as liquid water beneath the ice cap on Mars' south pole.

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Researchers have discovered that the turbulence found in the thermosphere -- known as the gateway to space -- and turbulence in the troposphere, here closer to sea level, follow the same physical laws despite having drastically different atmospheric compositions and dynamics.

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In the first quintillionth of a second, the universe may have sprouted microscopic black holes with enormous amounts of nuclear charge, MIT physicists propose. The gravitational pull from these tiny, invisible objects could potentially explain all the dark matter that we can't see today.

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Tropical forests store a third of the world's carbon in their wood and soils. However, their future as a carbon sink has been uncertain. Scientists have long wondered whether nutrient-poor tropical soils would limit the ability of mature and recovering forests to thrive. A study offers a hopeful response, suggesting that forests have flexible strategies that help them overcome the challenge of scarce nutrients.

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Using the James Webb Space Telescope, a team of astronomers studied the properties of a planet-forming disk around a young and very low-mass star. The results reveal the richest hydrocarbon composition seen to date in a protoplanetary disk, including the first extrasolar detection of ethane and a relatively low abundance of oxygen-bearing species. By including previous similar detections, this finding confirms a trend of disks around very low-mass stars to be chemically distinct from those around more massive stars like the Sun, influencing the atmospheres of planets forming there.

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New partitioning coefficients of first-transition row elements, Ga and Ge between olivine and silicate melt have been reported. New high-temperature experiments have investigated the effects of oxygen fugacity and iron content on these partition coefficients. This newly compiled dataset offers insights into interpreting trace elements found in olivine phenocrysts within lunar basalts, shedding light on the deep interior composition of the Moon.

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Scientists have detected what they believe to be a neutron star spinning at an unprecedentedly slow rate -- slower than any of the more than 3,000 radio emitting neutron stars measured to date.